Preparations for May 4 Town Hall Event

Our Core Working Group meeting yesterday focused almost entirely on tomorrow’s event. All committee members should be in attendance for at least a portion of the event, which will enable everyone to have some perspective about the event’s overall success when it comes time to evaluate the project.

While there were some general questions about the event structure, flow, and participants, most of our meeting time was spent in discussion about the EO lunch. The lunch will include the Provost, most program Executive Officers, and the administrative members of the Core Working Group. We’re hopeful that the EOs will see the need for curricular changes in order to address the central concerns of the Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. Grant. We’ve summarized our committee discussions into a few talking points, which will ideally inspire action from the faculty.

There was also some final planning regarding event promotion. Prior to yesterday’s meeting, we were a bit discouraged by the number of students and recent alumni registered to attend the day-long event. For all Graduate Center events, the primary obstacle to student attendance is the dissemination of event schedules and information by email through the individual Assistant Program Officers. Our committee members strategized how to best encourage students to attend the approaching event. In addition to final emails, we launched promotions on Twitter with the hashtag #PostGC2017. We will also encourage event participants to use this hashtag while tweeting about the event.

Moving Forward

At the end of the meeting, the Project Leaders distributed the white paper guidelines, and there was some general discussion about how best to proceed with evaluating our project and writing the document. This discussion will undoubtedly be revisited in our next meeting of both the Core Working Group and Project Steering Committee following our May 4 event.